Houston who had wasted his fortune and was now going all out to make up for his losses.
'It's kind of personal,' O'Neill said. 'Hurrell has just got to get Trevor. I don't like that much but I think we better give in a bit, for the sergeant's peace of mind.' O'Neill grinned. 'If there is such a thing. A contradiction in terms. How can something as essentially restless as a mind be peaceful?'
'Just before falling asleep,' the commissaris said.
O'Neill laughed. 'Or when it isn't working.' He tapped the commissaris's arm. 'Here is the deal with Trevor. Trevor killed Maggotmaid, we're sure of that. He got her up for the party, plied her with heroin, got her on a table for a sex show and discovered she was male. Or had been male. She'd had the operation. Russo didn't mention that at the lecture.'
'Oh dear,' the commissaris said. 'And you can't arrest the suspect?'
'Not with the kind of prosecutors I have to deal with,' O'Neill said. He looked grim as he raced the car to beat traffic lights. 'And not with the kinds of mistakes our detectives are making. Tom and Jerry-again-somehow managed to mess up the glass. The glass on Maggotmaid's clothes and the glass in the broken door in Trevor's apartment matched, but the evidence got mixed up. You ever have shit like that happen?'
'Oh yes,' the commissaris said, 'but we're short of cells, so arrests aren't welcome.'
O'Neill frowned furiously. 'We have the same problems. Quality-of-life offenses? Pickpocketing? Forget it. Overcrowded jails, overcrowded dockets. So Trevor walks. But Hurrell will find a way to kick him into the slammer sometime soon.'
The commissaris muttered as the big Chevrolet hurled itself between two buses.
'How?' O'Neill asked, touching his horn playfully. 'It's more like why. You see, Hurrell's only child went bad. Young Henry Hurrell became Henriette. But there was no operation. The parents weren't too thrilled and I guess they made the kid miserable. So did the other kids. A nail that sticks out gets hammered sometimes. So Henriette comforted herself with drugs. Mrs. Hurrell left the scene. She divorced Earl and the custody of the youngster went to the father. Mother transferred to a quiet sunny town in Arizona where everybody is so old that the worst they can do is sue each other. The former Mrs. Hurrell couldn't cope with a fourteen-year-old prostituting herself for heroin.'
'Himself,' the commissaris said.
'Nah.' O'Neill shook his head. 'I sort of knew the kid, ran into her a few times, and she was definitely female, never mind what her sexual organs looked like. She had a female personality, soft and gende, but that must have changed because she looked like a scarecrow when they found her with the garbage.'
'Garbage,' the commissaris said. 'Right. Sergeant Hurrell seemed bitter about 'garbage.' 'Human garbage,' he said.'
'A cold night.' O'Neill shook a friendly fist at a yellow taxi closing in, trying to cut him off, but not quite managing it. 'Bet you that cabbie is from Ghana. Probably had his driver's license printed up special.' He shook his head. 'You know, we laugh at those guys, and curse them, but can you imagine what it is like to get thrown into this city and nothing makes sense and you're supposed to drive a goddamn taxi?'
'A cold night,' the commissaris said. 'You were talking about Hurrell's transvestite child.'
'Right. Human garbage. The kid doesn't go home anymore, is living on the street. Hustles like crazy to keep the opium monkey fed. Picks up the disease from a dirty needle, gets pneumonia. God knows what assortment of deadly diseases those junkie whores collect during the course of one day.' O'Neill looked sideways at the commissaris. 'But the body persists. Think of the German death camps-bodies lived through that for quite a while sometimes. Abuse, starvation, it looks like we humans like to suffer. One early winter morning the kid faints. Next thing she freezes solid. We don't have too many real cold nights in New York but we do have a few killers. Gets rid of a lot of the homeless.' O'Neill raised his voice. 'Goddamn homeless, I hate them. You know why? They scare me shitless. Here we are, the most powerful country on the globe and we have human wrecks messing up our recreation areas, crapping around statues, pissing up public transport, dragging their sodden bodies about everywhere. If we can't cure their insane uselessness why don't we just warehouse those wrecks in some nice warm camp somewhere, with lots of TV and junk food and innocuous games to play? But no, sir, we need more aircraft carriers, for we've got to bomb holes in brown people's countries.'
'I like America,' the commissaris said.
O'Neill grumbled. 'So do I. This is the place. I want to drive cross-country again, or hang out in the Keys. I used to work summers there, crew on sailboats. Or go to Hawaii again, hard to be unhappy in Hawaii, right? They've got it all there.' He gestured. 'We've got it all everywhere, and if it ain't, UPS will deliver it tomorrow morning. Coast to coast. And anywhere in between.'
'And the UPS driver will speak English,' the commissaris said. 'And the currency will be dollars.'
'Efficiency, right?' O'Neill laughed. 'I've been to Europe and you have to change language every two hours, but you can't, so you're in trouble. And the backdrops seem so small there.' He gestured toward the World Trade Center's twin towers. 'Big stuff here.' He raised an eyebrow at the commissaris. 'You've traveled around in this country?'
The commissaris had been to Maine once. He talked about coves, bays, hills that looked like mountains to a Dutchman. 'Few people around. Amazing wildlife. Holland now imports its wildlife from Poland and then has to buy more because it starves or gets poached. Ravens, wild boars, deer-it's hard to share a square mile with nine hundred Dutchmen.'
'Lots of lobsters in Maine.' O'Neill was frowning again. 'But you freeze your ass off in winter.' He touched the commissaris's bare wrist. 'Know what some jokers did with frozen Henriette? Stuck her in a fifty-five-gallon trash can, upside down. You've seen the signs?
DON'T LITTER.'
The commissaris had seen the signs.
'Those jokers tried to burn the corpse too, but they ran out of lighter fuel.'
The commissaris mumbled disapproval.
'Hurrell caught them,' O'Neill said. 'A neat piece of detection. Lot of work. This happened early in the morning, when there are only bakers around, paperboys, cheap whores, maybe some sleepless old person looking out of a window.'
'He found witnesses like that?' The commissaris sounded surprised.
O'Neill nodded. 'Sure did. Hurrell's name isn't in the report because he couldn't take the credit. The defense would claim that he, as the kid's father, was biased.'
'Suspects convicted?'
'Yeah,' O'Neill said. 'The D.A. charged the jokers with intentional and unlawful mutilation of a corpse. That's a felony. One to three years in the clinker.'
'And now Sergeant Hurrell won't pay attention to the death of Bert Termeer,' the commissaris said, 'because he sees Maggotmaid as Henriette, his own child.'
'He'll get Trevor,' O'Neill said. 'You saw what is going on in Central Park, right under your window. Central Park is Hurrell's turf. He'll work the park, get the right statements and hit Trevor with a heavy drug charge.'
The commissaris could think of other charges. He tried to translate them from the Netherlandic Penal Code. 'Attempted manslaughter – Trevor pushed Maggotmaid through a glass door, causing death by negligence twice, first by administering an overdose of a controlled substance, second by locking, and leaving, a body in the hot and unventilated trunk of a parked car.'
O'Neill concentrated on his driving.
'What do you think, Chief?'
O'Neill growled. 'None of that will stick.' He sighed. 'Hurrell is using the right tactics. He pretends he's finished with Trevor, lulling him to sleep, so to speak. He wants to catch Trevor carrying at least a kilo.'
O'Neill parked the car. They got out and began to walk. 'But you have no case anyway. Bert Termeer died of disease, and maybe exposure.' He grinned at the commissaris. 'There is no doubt in my mind that the Termeer death was from natural causes. I want to close the case.'
The commissaris agreed. He had studied the reports the previous night, seen the photographs. Now he had an expert opinion as formulated by an experienced colleague. The commissaris was about to tell Chief O'Neill that he agreed that Termeer's death was due to an unfortunate combination of circumstances beyond the control of any human agency.
It was just a coincidence, he told himself, that a touring bus appeared. The bus displayed a big number 2 up
